The truth behind MTG’s claim that covid recall leads to hospitalization

Requirement

Seven to 8% of recipients of the updated covid-19 reminder ‘get so sick they have to go to hospital’.

The truth is that according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 0.03% of people aged 12 and over who received one of the new covid-19 reminders ended up in hospital with serious side effects. And, according to CDCno children (ages 5-11) were hospitalized after receiving the booster.

When the CDC tracked those who reported hospitalization after vaccination, more than half said their hospitalization was unrelated to the covid vaccine they received.

how it started

On Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in a viral tweet that 7-8% of people end up being hospitalized after receiving a reminder, citing Texas cardiologist Peter McCullough. Greene added that a recent Rasmussen poll also found that 7% of adults receiving a booster have to go to the hospital because of the vaccine.

“Healthy people and children should not be vaccinated and the risks increase dramatically with boosters,” she wrote.

The claim that 7-8% of booster recipients end up in hospital is false.

The original source of the complaints

Greene has two sources for the same false claim: McCullough and a Rasmussen Reports poll.

A frequent purveyor of misinformation

Let’s start with McCullough.

For context, it should be noted that McCullough is a frequent purveyor of covid-19 misinformation. At a pandemic response roundtable in January last year hosted by GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), McCullough falsely claimed that the CDC had verified 21,000 cases of myocarditis, a inflammation of the heart muscle. In fact, the CDC has only found about 700 cases in children and teens — the ages most likely to develop the side effect — after administering more than 60 million doses of mRNA covid vaccines to these groups. .

The problem with V-SAFE data

In this most recent claim, McCullough cited CDC V-SAFE data to claim that 7-8% of Americans “get so sick they have to go to the hospital” after the second booster.

V-SAFE is a covid vaccine safety monitoring system created by the CDC in December 2020. Participants register for V-SAFE with a smartphone after receiving the first dose of vaccine voluntarily report side effects to the CDC. The CDC sends text messages with a brief health survey for participants to report new or worsening symptoms and health conditions since their vaccination. Doctors are skeptical of V-SAFE data because self-reported side effects are not necessarily representative of everyone who has had the vaccine. Rather, V-SAFE is a tool the CDC uses to look for unexpected side effects or patterns of side effects in vaccine recipients. But the agency uses data from several other sources to paint a full picture of the safety profile of injections.

Yet V-SAFE data, which includes data since covid vaccines became available, can be misused and misinterpreted.

The V-SAFE program asks participants about changes in their health status, whether vaccine-related or not. As William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, explained, anything that happens after a vaccination that a participant thinks is related to the vaccine can be reported. This means that sometimes a symptom that is not related to the vaccine or even a symptom that a participant had before the vaccine can be flagged in the system.

“These are just anecdotal reports from the patient themselves,” Schaffner said. “So these are not medically verified.”

The other problem with using V-SAFE data is that the program is not necessarily representative of everyone who gets vaccinated.

In fact, Schaffner said, people likely to have some sort of reaction to the vaccine are likely more likely to take part in the program, so again, it’s not necessarily representative of the broader vaccinated population.

Analyzes of CDC safety data also do not support this claim. According to a November 2022 report, no children aged 5-11 received hospital care after receiving the bivalent booster. And, according to the CDC, based on data from V-SAFE and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)hospitalization was reported in only 0.03% of booster recipients aged 12 and older.

It’s also important to note that the CDC is reviewing what’s coming in through V-SAFE and VAERS and investigating any potentially concerning reports or reporting patterns. The CDC’s analyzes are also based on data from V-SAFE as well as VAERS, which draw on reports from doctors and the public.

The problem with polls

The Rasmussen poll, cited by Greene, which comes to the same conclusion as McCullough is also problematic.

First, as noted by David Mayhew, a clinical radiation oncologist at Tufts Medical Center, public survey data “is very different from medical facts.”

He added that how questions are asked in a survey is also important. For example, the Rasmussen poll asks participants if they experienced any “major side effects,” but as Mayhew points out, the poll never defines what a major or minor side effect is. “These are going to be defined differently by different people,” he said.

A statement that lacks common sense

According to this survey, “7% of those who reported major side effects,” which the survey says means about 12 million people. More generally, experts say it just doesn’t make sense.

Here are some figures to contextualize these figures.

From October, 613 million doses of mRNA vaccines had been released in the United States, at the average rate of 30,000 doses per day.

If the 7% number were indeed true, that would mean about two to three thousand hospitalizations per day from the covid vaccine and booster shots, given the large number of people in the United States who received them, Peter said. Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “That would obviously set off red flares all over the place,” Hotez said, “and you’d be talking about 50 million hospitalizations.”

Hotez added that “there is no common sense associated” with that claim.

A Kernel of Truth: Side Effects and Reactogenicity

Hanging on to his assertion about V-SAFE data, McCullough also said that reactogenicity – or the tendency to cause side effects after vaccination – increases about 80 times from the first to the second shot of initial covid vaccinations, then increases further. more on shooting Three. Another misrepresentation.

According to the CDC, the side effects of the first and second doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines are roughly similar, with similar side effects after a third booster dose.

Hotez explained that compared to other vaccines, mRNA vaccines are relatively reactogenic. That is, they have side effects, but they’re generally mild by medical standards — a little worse than what most people feel after a flu shot, but consistent with the side effects of shingles vaccines given to people. elderly. In general, reactogenicity is not particularly unusual in many adult vaccines.

Typical reactions to covid mRNA vaccines may include arm pain, redness in the arm, mild fever, body aches or malaise. But he stressed that these reactions are “far from a typical adverse event”. To be clear: these are not the kind of side effects that land someone in the hospital.

“Fever, injection site pain, fatigue, and headache are commonly reported in the days following vaccination,” a CDC spokesperson told Grid. “This includes reactions reported after receiving a second injection or a booster. Most side effects after a covid-19 booster were mild to moderate, temporary, and similar to those experienced after routine vaccinations.

The most serious side effect of mRNA covid vaccines – those made by Moderna and Pfizer – is myocarditis. But this is a rare side effect. “That number was put between 1 in 12,000 and 1 in 16,000,” Hotez said. “What anti-vaccine activists are trying to do is anyone who has another serious effect temporarily linked to vaccination that they want to attribute to cause and effect, when in fact it is not the case.”

Hotez described this type of misinformation, which exaggerates vaccine side effects, fails to mention that side effects occur even with a placebo, and never mentions vaccine benefits as “weaponized health communication.”

This article has been updated. Thanks to Brett Zach for writing this article.